The Thing We Fear
How to save lives and end this social crisis
Living excessively for the present harms us now and wrecks our future.
A new mindset and personal courage can restore our damaged society.
This social crisis will end when we decide it will end — and not a minute sooner.
“Oh, what ridiculous resolutions men take when possessed with fear! It deprives them of the use of those means which reason offers for their relief … fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself, when apparent to the eyes; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about.”
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719
“Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–82
Time Bandits
The on-going social crisis since March has turned our personal worlds upside down and converted an “old normal” into an “unnormal”, a surreal place where we clumsily try to live alone in an unforgivingly connected society.
The crisis has turned us radically inward in so many ways: we seldom venture away from home, we obsess about our health like hypochondriacs, and we avoid close contact with anyone but our closest family and friends.
We treat strangers as dangers and we are suspicious of everything we touch and the very air that we breathe.
We also live excessively in the present, another way in which we turn ourselves away from normality, that time just passed when we calmly and deliberately planned for the future.
The evidence for our obsession with the present, and our rejection of the future, is all around us.
It can be seen in the uncertainty created by erratic pandemic policies, which are volatile, inconsistent, and unpredictable and constrain our freedom of action. Who can focus on the future when today’s rules are prone to change in an instant?
We see it in the casual dismissal of the costs of not properly educating our children. The next generation embodies the future and yet we are delaying and diminishing the education of more than a billion otherwise eager students.
We find it in the economy, where investment for the future has plunged and where real interest rates, the price of time, are actually below zero. In essence, we have to pay for safe investments, instead of the normal situation where we earn money for our patience.
We see the obsession with today blasted from every TV screen and computer monitor, as breaking news journalism counts off each and every new case of Covid, recants public health decrees, and encourages us to think about every nuance of the crisis, instead of imagining our post-pandemic lives. Staying in the now is obviously valuable click bait.
It is also evident in the negative space of our often strangely quiet streets, offices and public places, where people are not meeting, nor making new contacts, nor sharing ideas, nor creating new business, nor planning for the future like they used to do.
And we see it most tragically in the health care system, where people are being harmed and lives are being lost owing to a fear of the future, specifically the reduced capacity in hospitals and primary care as preparation for an always-coming-but-never-arriving surge in serious Covid cases.
So far, this misallocation of health resources has probably harmed more people unnecessarily than the pandemic itself. Continuing lockdowns and other restrictive policies are further forecast to harm millions more in the near term, as we take our eyes off communicable disease prevention and treatment.
So, our urge to steal time and attention from the future and park it today is damaging our children, our livelihoods, our physical health, and even our mental well-being. It is unintentionally killing people, in a misguided effort to save lives by trying to directly control the virus.
This is why it is absolutely essential to end this unnormal period as soon and as completely as possible.
Full Stop Ahead
While most of us are stuck in the present, a few people are looking ahead to the end of the pandemic (but not necessarily the social crisis) and they have made predictions as to the timing and reasons for such a termination.
Sadly, as befits the danger (and perhaps folly) of anticipating the future in detail, some of the predictions are already completely wrong.
For example, a mid-April US assessment got somewhat ahead of itself:
“An influential coronavirus model cited by the White House predicts the pandemic will “peter out” in May — “The one thing we absolutely know for sure is that social distancing measures work and … you’ll get transmission essentially down to zero.”
At about the same time, high tech soothsaying using AI did no better:
“Globally, their system predicts the pandemic will end this December. But the end date is estimated to vary immensely among nations, from June in Australia to October in Italy.” Perhaps still right overall, but wrong already for both countries that were cited.
More recent predictions (luckily for them) cannot be judged yet, since their expiry dates have not come and gone.
So, in chronological order of outcomes, we have the following survey of notable authorities around the world concerning the end of the pandemic:
Epidemiologists — during 2021 based on vaccine development,
Bill Gates — end-2021 owing to a new vaccine,
WHO — “in a shorter time than two years” due to advances in technology,
Anthony Fauci — “[W]hether it’s this year or next year. I’m not certain” based on some immunity and a vaccine,
BC Minister of Health — “This pandemic that we are all tired of, so very tired of, will be going on … through 2021 into 2022” owing to community spread,
Former US surgeon general — “more than two years” due to slower vaccination distribution,
WHO — “anticipated lengthy duration … noting the importance of sustained … response efforts”,
Public Health Officer — “We will probably go through our first wave, second waves, third waves and fourth waves”,
Epidemiologists — “Possibility of resurgences … which could occur as late as 2025”
Anthony Fauci — “How will it end? We will have control over it”,
Epidemiologist — The “pandemic will end naturally and will become part of our lives just like influenza”,
Evolutionary Biologist — “From a virus’ point of view, the definition of success is to become the common cold”,
Epidemiologists — “We will probably be living with this virus for the rest of our lives”,
Anthony Fauci — “Just as emerging infections provide for us a perpetual challenge, we need to be perpetually prepared”,
UK’s SAGE — Covid-19 will be “with us forever in some form or another”,
Epidemiologist — “We will be dealing with this virus forever”
Microbiologist — “It is impossible to put a date on it”,
Epidemiologist — “We don’t know”.
As you can see, there is a vast range of opinions on calling the end of the pandemic, from next year to forever. Unfortunately, no one is suggesting an end any time sooner.
This survey is also an antidote against those constantly barking about “the science”, since it shows the fundamental disagreement between epidemiologists on the nature of the pandemic.
By the way, the last answer (“don’t know”) is probably the best one, given the many times that people have been mistaken during the past few months on everything from the virus itself to the myriad public policies created to fight it.
Mistaken Identity
But is this all spectacularly missing the point?
Isn’t the deeper issue our response to the pandemic, rather than the pandemic itself?
After all, the response has affected more people, had greater damage, and is likelier to have longer-lived consequences.
The more fundamental and important issue is social, not medical or biological.
Therefore, we need to forecast the end of the social crisis, not the underlying pandemic. The two are not necessarily tied to the hip, as evidenced by the fact that descendants of the H1N1 Spanish Flu virus are still circulating after 100 years, and we have no social crisis from that time.
But how can anyone predict a social phenomenon that includes billions of people and their unknowable reactions and behaviors?
After all, we already know that markets cannot be predicted with confidence and that covers only the economic or financial aspects of life. The response to this pandemic is so much broader and has hit us everywhere from the economy and social interactions to mass psychology and politics.
The Real End
As an alternative to prediction, since it is destined to failure, we can instead set out the necessary conditions for an end to the social crisis.
A minimal list includes:
· Interacting normally with people,
· Not constantly monitoring our health,
· Assessing risk in proportion to its importance,
· Arguing for change through open discussion,
· Winning the political argument for change,
· Restoring freedom of association,
· Ending overly restrictive public policies, and
· Opening borders to movement.
You will immediately notice that there is a catch-22 to this list: the elements are identical to the conditions that describe our normal behavior, that is, the world prior to 2020.
In other words, the end of the social crisis is behavioral. We need to act normal and that determined change in mindset is enough to take us back to our preferred state of living.
This is (massively) easier said than done, since the change in mindset and behavior in turn:
· Require politicians to rescind their extraordinary social controls,
· Ask the most fearful among us to master their anxieties,
· Charge all of us to have the courage to engage in a natural way with other people,
· Ask us to accept the risk of contagion as a normal part of life,
· Demand that we respect other people and not force them to comply with our views, and
· Force us to recognize that the world is messy and that we will never revert completely to our old way of living.
Taking this perspective, it is evident that there is no one who will stand up one day and announce that the pandemic and associated social crisis are over. No scientist, no expert, no leader, no messiah has the power or knowledge to pull that off.
This is a collective event and so we have to persuade our fellow citizens and pressure our politicians to change their ways.
We need to master our fears and choose to live free again. That day is when the social crisis will end.
